Abandon 37 (Is this the end?)

[electricduck]

https://www.spinics.net/lists/fedora-devel/msg304445.html

Having been out-of-the-loop for some time, this has only just now been brought to my attention (TL;DR there is no way Pantheon can be supported for Fedora 37 as of currently, possibly even Fedora 38). With that in mind, I am going to abandon the 37 release (removing branches, etc.). Currently, 37 was being built by using old repositories for 36 — as I was unaware of what was going on — but this is a truely awful hack that will break someday and I am unwilling to allow to be production.

These tasks need doing:

• Return main branch to 36 (currently 37)
• Remove release/f37 branch
• Remove all current tags for v/f37/37-xx.xx
• Stop builds of sodalite/f37/<arch>/<edition> on the build server
• Remove all builds of sodalite/f37/<arch>/<edition> on the build server

As it stands, the fate of Sodalite rests in limbo, as I too do not have the capacity to invest in getting Pantheon working on Fedora 37+: a real bummer for me since Sodalite is my daily. The good news is 36 will continue to be supported until 16-May-2022, so hopefully something can be resolved by this time — issues are still welcome and releases will still be made.

Development for 38+ will still continue in release/next by retaining the current ugly using-36-repositories hack, but bear in mind this will break someday until the main issue is resolved, and on that day builds will stop and releases for sodalite/next/<arch>/<edition> won't be tagged.

Stay tuned.

[electricduck]

All tasks completed. Closing issue, but keeping it pinned.

[akatsukilevi]

Could it be that, once the eOS 7 is released, they shift focus into fixing compatibility with libsoup2 to libsoup3 which could help with the broken state of Pantheon on Fedora? Don't even know if eOS even uses libsoup? Will search it up and edit this comment once I'm back

EDIT: Didn't found anything about elementary using libsoup(most because I probably didn't searched right), but I have seen that it is a HTTP client/server lib. Couldn't it be replaced? Like, a drop-in replacement made to support eOS Desktop on Fedora? Or would the effort be too high for too little return?

[electricduck]

Some apps require an older version of evolution-data-server which uses libsoup2. See:

• support for webkit2gtk-4.1 / evolution-data-server 3.45+ / libsoup-3 elementary/mail#793
• Support evolution data server 3.45+ / libsoup-3.0 / geocode-glib-2.0 elementary/calendar#756

The main problem is not so much the apps, since we could start just using Flatpak versions, but the lack of support for libmutter-11 which powers Gala, Greeter, and Wingpanel. See:

• support libmutter-11 elementary/gala#1447
• support libmutter-11 elementary/greeter#617
• support libmutter-11 elementary/wingpanel#462

There's also a bunch of apps that require older versions of libwebkit.

Gotta keep in mind eOS sticks to an LTS version of Ubuntu, so it can easily stay using old packages for years at a time. However, eOS 7 is due to use Ubuntu 22.04 (which still carries older versions of packages). All these referenced issues are open and some are being worked on but none will be finished in time for 37. I am not entirely aware of where the development focus will shift after eOS 7.

Just as a side note, it is not me who keeps these packages maintained, but @decathorpe, who has also stated in the mail they have little time to fix these issues.

'scuse the rambly nature of this reply -- quickly typed it out on my phone.

[akatsukilevi]

For Gala I saw there is a pending PR related to mutter-11(elementary/gala#1457), but haven't seen anything with greeter and wingpanel.

Will try to fork it at weekend and see if I can try to somehow help with the issues, maybe at least fixing the mutter compatibility issue may help

[decathorpe]

Yeah, I feel bad about the situation 😞 The desktop components (gala, wingpanel, greeter) were neither build-able nor install-able on Fedora 37 due to the bi-annual mutter breakage, which was to be expected. But in addition to that, the changes with GNOME 43 also broke builds / installability about half the desktop applications (mostly due to incompatibilities with libsoup-3, evolution-data-server 3.45+, webkitgtk-4.1, ...).

I didn't want Fedora 37 to ship with the packages in this sad state, so the only reasonable thing I could do was to remove the packages from Fedora 37+, at least temporarily.

There's two factors that make this development cycle particularly bad - the big underlying changes in GNOME 43, and the slower-than-usual upstream development due to financial problems / reduced full-time staff / focus of their work on getting elementary OS 7 out ... and given that elementary OS 7 will (probably? unless the release is delayed even further ...) be based on ubuntu 22.04, porting projects to versions of GNOME libraries that will only affect them in 18 months is obviously low priority.

[akatsukilevi]

Until then sadly not much that can be done

Still going to see if I can try to at least get it to build(even if by using flextape lol) on 37 and how broken it is

In the meantime still going to daily drive Fedora 36, as I believe it won't be breaking overnight. Hopefully we can think on something while Sodalite is still working fine

[electricduck]

In the meantime still going to daily drive Fedora 36, as I believe it won't be breaking overnight. Hopefully we can think on something while Sodalite is still working fine

Like to point out my production machine is running on the f35 branch (sodalite/f35/x86_64/base), basically meaning its still running on Fedora 35, and I haven't really run into any problems being slightly behind major Fedora releases. Most of my apps are coming from Flatpak, and I'm doing development in distrobox, so no biggy on potentially outdated libraries. Probably will be kept that way until November when its EoL.

So yes, 36 should be fairly usable until late next year.

[akatsukilevi]

And hopefully late next year we might have something that we can do about Sodalite that could hopefully bring it to F37

[pieckenst]

Seems like there were some fixes added for new mutter in elementary/wingpanel#465
elementary/gala#1457
elementary/greeter#621

[pieckenst]

So there should be only the matter of elementary apps now in terms of using pantheon on fedora 37

[electricduck]

So there should be only the matter of elementary apps now in terms of using pantheon on fedora 37

In terms of apps, we can live without some native versions as the next version of Sodalite (36-23.0) will finally begin using elementary's Flatpak apps (of which there are only a few right now -- the rest will stay as the natively installed versions until they become available as Flatpaks) with thanks to a new migration tool which will do all the heavy lifting.

As such, this still lies in the hands of @decathorpe however, as I don't build these myself specfically for Sodalite (not point in re-inventing the wheel!)

[electricduck]

Don't get too excited yet as its not feature-complete, but thanks to Terra (thanks @lleyton and @windowsboy111) we might have a potential 37 after all...

Issues

Missing packages

The switchboard-plug-useraccounts package (which comes from elementary-staging) had to be removed in order to get a build working, otherwise this error occurs during build:

error: Could not depsolve transaction; 2 problems detected:
[...]
 Problem 2: conflicting requests
  - nothing provides libgnome-desktop-3.so.19()(64bit) needed by switchboard-plug-useraccounts-2.4.2-1.fc37.x86_64

Indicators

wingpanel-community-indiciators doesn't seem to function anymore, as is evident by the missing ellipsis icon in Wingpanel.

Flatpak apps

The top three applications (Calculator, Archive Manager, Document Viewer) are provided by Flatpak with visible locale/font problems, but the bottom application (Code) is not provided by Flatpak and does not exhibit these problems.

Further testing

As Terra is also providing much newer packages than currently exists on Fedora 36's repositories, it'll also need a thorough test before I even consider shipping it.

[pieckenst]

i hope the terra thing does work out:) I'll wait for updates on whatever the further testing thing might involve

[pieckenst]

how would i go about rebasing my fedora silverblue 37 install to this new experimental branch if i were to try it?

[electricduck]

how would i go about rebasing my fedora silverblue 37 install to this new experimental branch if i were to try it?

You can now test it by pulling sodalite/f37/x86_64/desktop.

[pieckenst]

how would i go about rebasing my fedora silverblue 37 install to this new experimental branch if i were to try it?

You can now test it by pulling sodalite/f37/x86_64/desktop.

sudo rpm-ostree rebase sodalite:sodalite/f37/x86_64/desktop
2 metadata, 0 content objects fetched; 0 байт content written
Checking out tree 5a149ee... done
Inactive requests:
  gcc (already provided by gcc-12.2.1-4.fc37.x86_64)
  make (already provided by make-1:4.3-11.fc37.x86_64)
Enabled rpm-md repositories: fedora-cisco-openh264 fedora-modular updates-modular updates fedora rpmfusion-free-updates rpmfusion-free rpmfusion-nonfree-updates rpmfusion-nonfree phracek-PyCharm google-chrome rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver rpmfusion-nonfree-steam copr:copr.fedorainfracloud.org:rankyn:xivlauncher updates-archive
Importing rpm-md... done
rpm-md repo 'fedora-cisco-openh264' (cached); generated: 2022-10-06T11:01:40Z solvables: 4
rpm-md repo 'fedora-modular' (cached); generated: 2022-11-10T09:23:24Z solvables: 1454
rpm-md repo 'updates-modular' (cached); generated: 2023-01-03T01:27:52Z solvables: 1464
rpm-md repo 'updates' (cached); generated: 2023-01-10T01:17:16Z solvables: 15367
rpm-md repo 'fedora' (cached); generated: 2022-11-10T09:30:00Z solvables: 66822
rpm-md repo 'rpmfusion-free-updates' (cached); generated: 2023-01-06T18:19:00Z solvables: 148
rpm-md repo 'rpmfusion-free' (cached); generated: 2022-11-11T16:54:42Z solvables: 496
rpm-md repo 'rpmfusion-nonfree-updates' (cached); generated: 2023-01-06T18:39:54Z solvables: 43
rpm-md repo 'rpmfusion-nonfree' (cached); generated: 2022-11-11T17:25:12Z solvables: 218
rpm-md repo 'phracek-PyCharm' (cached); generated: 2022-12-30T11:01:04Z solvables: 5
rpm-md repo 'google-chrome' (cached); generated: 2023-01-05T15:19:40Z solvables: 3
rpm-md repo 'rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver' (cached); generated: 2023-01-06T19:34:32Z solvables: 30
rpm-md repo 'rpmfusion-nonfree-steam' (cached); generated: 2022-08-24T16:15:54Z solvables: 2
rpm-md repo 'copr:copr.fedorainfracloud.org:rankyn:xivlauncher' (cached); generated: 2023-01-10T03:29:05Z solvables: 6
rpm-md repo 'updates-archive' (cached); generated: 2023-01-10T01:32:46Z solvables: 16587
Resolving dependencies... done
Will download: 2 packages (711,6 кБ)
Downloading from 'fedora'... done
Downloading from 'updates'... done
Importing packages... done
Relabeling... done
Checking out packages... done
error: Checkout libXcursor-1.2.1-2.fc37.i686: Hardlinking c0/274906d6388f6c59c58a08dc9ae6915b763f5cca5a5612ebae6c4450bacda6.file to index.theme: File exists

errors out on my end during rebase

[electricduck]

how would i go about rebasing my fedora silverblue 37 install to this new experimental branch if i were to try it?

You can now test it by pulling sodalite/f37/x86_64/desktop.

sudo rpm-ostree rebase sodalite:sodalite/f37/x86_64/desktop
2 metadata, 0 content objects fetched; 0 байт content written
Checking out tree 5a149ee... done
Inactive requests:
  gcc (already provided by gcc-12.2.1-4.fc37.x86_64)
  make (already provided by make-1:4.3-11.fc37.x86_64)
Enabled rpm-md repositories: fedora-cisco-openh264 fedora-modular updates-modular updates fedora rpmfusion-free-updates rpmfusion-free rpmfusion-nonfree-updates rpmfusion-nonfree phracek-PyCharm google-chrome rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver rpmfusion-nonfree-steam copr:copr.fedorainfracloud.org:rankyn:xivlauncher updates-archive
Importing rpm-md... done
rpm-md repo 'fedora-cisco-openh264' (cached); generated: 2022-10-06T11:01:40Z solvables: 4
rpm-md repo 'fedora-modular' (cached); generated: 2022-11-10T09:23:24Z solvables: 1454
rpm-md repo 'updates-modular' (cached); generated: 2023-01-03T01:27:52Z solvables: 1464
rpm-md repo 'updates' (cached); generated: 2023-01-10T01:17:16Z solvables: 15367
rpm-md repo 'fedora' (cached); generated: 2022-11-10T09:30:00Z solvables: 66822
rpm-md repo 'rpmfusion-free-updates' (cached); generated: 2023-01-06T18:19:00Z solvables: 148
rpm-md repo 'rpmfusion-free' (cached); generated: 2022-11-11T16:54:42Z solvables: 496
rpm-md repo 'rpmfusion-nonfree-updates' (cached); generated: 2023-01-06T18:39:54Z solvables: 43
rpm-md repo 'rpmfusion-nonfree' (cached); generated: 2022-11-11T17:25:12Z solvables: 218
rpm-md repo 'phracek-PyCharm' (cached); generated: 2022-12-30T11:01:04Z solvables: 5
rpm-md repo 'google-chrome' (cached); generated: 2023-01-05T15:19:40Z solvables: 3
rpm-md repo 'rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver' (cached); generated: 2023-01-06T19:34:32Z solvables: 30
rpm-md repo 'rpmfusion-nonfree-steam' (cached); generated: 2022-08-24T16:15:54Z solvables: 2
rpm-md repo 'copr:copr.fedorainfracloud.org:rankyn:xivlauncher' (cached); generated: 2023-01-10T03:29:05Z solvables: 6
rpm-md repo 'updates-archive' (cached); generated: 2023-01-10T01:32:46Z solvables: 16587
Resolving dependencies... done
Will download: 2 packages (711,6 кБ)
Downloading from 'fedora'... done
Downloading from 'updates'... done
Importing packages... done
Relabeling... done
Checking out packages... done
error: Checkout libXcursor-1.2.1-2.fc37.i686: Hardlinking c0/274906d6388f6c59c58a08dc9ae6915b763f5cca5a5612ebae6c4450bacda6.file to index.theme: File exists

errors out on my end during rebase

As this is an environmental issue that I've also come across, I've opened a ticket about libXcursor at #53.

[pieckenst]

Got it installed and working now:) thanks for the help in telegram

[electricduck]

Locking this issue in favor of #56